The rebel who preferred ideas to ideology

Wednesday, 26 March 2014 11:13
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MJ Akbar remembers Khushwant Singh.

Khushwant Singh was never a journalist’s journalist; he was an author’s journalist. He brought the narrative sweep of an artistic temperament to periodical writing. He was already a phenomenon as a novelist with Train to Pakistan when he was invited to become editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a flagship publication of The Times of India group. But the ship had stalled on conventional design, born of a mindset that was still marooned in the British Raj.

One wonders if those who made him editor were fully aware of the consequences. Khushwant, week after illustrative week, became a shredding machine of convention. There must have been a few men at the top of the Times who were bewildered by his radicalism. But Khushwant never took seriously anyone who took himself too seriously. He was a sworn enemy of pomp, and defined his own circumstance. No other editor would dare to enter office wearing a towel-cloth T-shirt. It was a cultural shock. He carried off his insouciance with aplomb. Any and all opposition was silenced by the most powerful weapon in an editor’s armoury, the reader. The circulation rose with the majesty of a phoenix.

If fiction is about contemporary life then journalism is about temporary realities. Khushwant Singh traversed the distance without a hiccup because he laughed at the thought of being trapped in any ivory tower. He much preferred, as the iconic illustration above his column confirmed, life in a light bulb. Mario, that inspired artist and cartoonist, drew that brilliant image, with its friendly mischievous grin, which defined him to millions.

A bulb is a familiar symbol of an idea. Khushwant preferred ideas to any ideology. He was, in a sense, profoundly non-ideological. He thought the Left, which was the intellectual fashion of the age, was inherently antagonistic to individual liberty, which he prized above all else, because of its doctrinaire traps. He saw doctrine as a casket, fit for a graveyard. And the right was too strident for his tastes. He wandered around the productive middle, taking positions on merit.

This did not make him non-partisan, as anyone who knows anything about the man who dragged Indian journalism into the 20th century will confirm. His most famous display of bias was towards Mrs Indira Gandhi. In 1971, when Mrs Gandhi was the nation’s heroine, this was unexceptionable. In fact, he was just one of a crowd when Mrs Gandhi first liberated Congress from a morbid old guard, and then helped liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan with a marvellous display of tough, bold leadership. But to do so in 1975, when she imposed an Emergency, imprisoned opposition leaders and ordered censorship of the Press, required loyalty beyond belief. The shock was that a libertarian like Khushwant Singh should become an advocate of dictatorship. His own explanations were hopelessly weak, when he cared to offer them, but he was relentless in his support.

The only excuse, if there is one, was that he was contrarian. If there was a tide in human affairs, that, taken at the flood, led on to fortune, Khushwant would catch the opposite current. I don’t think he would have made such a public fetish out of Scotch whisky if Mumbai, where he lived during his Weekly years, did not have prohibition. If drinking had been legal, he might even have become a teetotaller. His fertile views on love and sex were a little more complicated but here too one major impulse was to tweak the Victorian prudery that so dominated the thinking of “respectable” Indians.

The worldwide youth movement of the ’60s, in which the young brandished a molotov cocktail in Paris, and a marijuana cigarette in California, came to India in the early 1970s, in precisely those years when the Weekly began to climb the charts. This wasn’t accidental. Khushwant became the rebel that Indian middle class youth were looking for, the writer who admired Gandhi without recognizing the rules of a Gandhi ashram.

Khushwant Singh believed in the young, and in young journalists, to an extent that would have been remarkable in any age, but was positively insurrectionist in 1970 and 1971. The media hierarchy left those on the first rung of the ladder scratching around for years. Khushwant lifted them to the top with a carefree shrug, but with a very, very careful eye on the copy they submitted. I have no idea what life would have had in store for me if Khushwant, and his wonderful deputy editor Fatma Zakaria, had not offered me the chance that changed my fortunes. But this I do know: what they did was enough to command a lifetime’s gratitude.

Khushwant Singh was The Master. He pretended not to believe in God, but I do fancy that God certainly believed in him. Khushwant Singh was among the chosen. After 99 years of happy turbulence, his soul now rests in peace.

—MJ Akbar is the Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian.

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